Exclusive: Wildfire crisis depicted by congressional district
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Photo illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios. Photo: Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images
A new interactive map and report — provided first to Axios — show wildfire risks in the West are outpacing preventative measures.
Why it matters: The work from the Property and Environment Research Center and UC Davis shows that risks can differ from one congressional district to the next.
- "We have a really high wildfire risk across the West, and we aren't doing nearly enough to prevent these fires," Hannah Downey, PERC's policy director, told Axios in an interview.
Threat level: Wildfires have become more frequent, larger and more intense in recent decades. They've also extended earlier into spring and later into fall across much of the West, in trends tied to human-caused climate change.
- As risks increase, PERC is trying to help show where more prescribed burning and other proactive measures should be taken to lower, though not eliminate, the dangers of a wildfire disaster.
- PERC focuses on incentives-based environmental stewardship, including market-based approaches.
- Downey said agencies in the West should be dramatically increasing preventative treatment measures, such as forest thinning and prescribed burns, to lower wildfire dangers.
She said multiple wildfire-related bills in Congress seek to address some of these issues.
Zoom in: PERC and UC Davis found that in the past decade, nearly 13% of U.S. Forest Service land in the western U.S. burned, but less than 4% of Forest Service land was subject to preventive treatment like prescribed burns.
- In California, 24% of Forest Service land burned from 2010 to 2020, the research shows.
- Out of the 10 congressional districts with the largest shares of Forest Service-burned land, eight are in California, while two are in Arizona.
- Nine of the 10 districts with the highest shares of Forest Service land at high wildfire risk are in California.
The bottom line: The West's wildfire crisis is escalating, yet policies that can help are widely known. Now, PERC says, it's a matter of directing interventions strategically to the areas at highest risk.
